In April 2009, the website's founders ( Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm) were found guilty in the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden for assisting in copyright infringement and were sentenced to serve one year in prison and pay a fine. The website has faced several shutdowns and domain seizures, switching to a series of new web addresses to continue operating. The Pirate Bay has sparked controversies and discussion about legal aspects of file sharing, copyright, and civil liberties and has become a platform for political initiatives against established intellectual property laws as well as a central figure in an anti-copyright movement. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay allows visitors to search, download, and contribute magnet links and torrent files, which facilitate peer-to-peer, file sharing among users of the BitTorrent protocol. The Pirate Bay (sometimes abbreviated as TPB) is an online index of digital content of entertainment media and software. Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clients.Advertisements, donations, merchandise, cryptocurrency mining
